Please note that NRA “Round-Up” contributions come from you, our Customers, and each week since 1992 we have sent your contributions directly to the NRA/ILA National Endowment for the Protection of the 2nd Amendment. Our Customers should get all the credit for that, we just collect and remit your money. Now, in March of 2013 came another milestone to celebrate – one million active Customers – Customers who have ordered from MidwayUSA during the last twelve months. For a country kid from Missouri, that’s an amazing milestone.

Midway is one of NRA’s largest, if not the largest corporate donors, but it’s all done voluntarily by the customers… the one million customers. Like I said, the gun control proponents go through great lengths to convince themselves they aren’t battling millions of real people, but that would make them kind of awful, wouldn’t it?

It’s hard for me to think of any activity or past time people engage in that I find horrible enough that I think it ought to be taken away from them. Even though I will admit I like being able to go out without having to deal with cigarette smoke, as a general principle of freedom I remain opposed to public smoking bans. That’s about the closest thing I can think of. It’s hard to think of anything else that doesn’t involve a tragedy of the commons issue. I guess I just don’t have any Carrie Nation type moral crusading tendencies. I have enough going on managing my own life. I definitely don’t have the time to manage anyone else’s.

More accurate, I think, would be that NRA has much more influence on the industry than the industry has on NRA, but that’s largely because of the numbers of customers NRA can influence. Getting any kind of action out of the industry is herding cats, because you’re dealing with a lot of small, privately held companies, in addition to a few publicly traded companies.

It’s kind of amazing that the idea that NRA is a manifestation of the gun industry persists when in the 1960s and the 1990s, the industry was far more amenable to restrictions that would benefit it than the NRA was. The industry would greatly benefit from restrictions on private transfers today, but it dare not lobby for them because their customer base would eat them alive. Part of the discipline that comes from the industry today is because the Internet makes cat herding a lot more efficient.

It’s funny how these dynamics work. I wouldn’t say *all* the causes on the left are astroturf, but many are–and gun control is definitely one of them. The amusing thing is how this works in reverse–since so many Republican politicians are well aware of how effective conservative and libertarian grass-roots efforts can be, every time they see something like this on the left, they immediately think it’s real. It’s in the media, there are all these people–or so it seems. The GOP politicians take it seriously, when they shouldn’t.

Let’s be honest–the real fear isn’t that Americans want more gun control. We know they don’t. The fear isn’t that Democrats are going to be effective on this issue. They aren’t. The real fear is that the GOP is going to be stupid long enough to fall for this bullshit, and cave. Which they do with astonishing regularity.

Let’s be honest–the real fear isn’t that Americans want more gun control. We know they don’t

A big mistake our opponents make is thinking that telling a pollster they want X means Americans want X. A lot of businesses have failed believing that. Without being willing to pay the price for X, then the reality is that Americans don’t really want it, no matter what they tell pollsters. What’s made us powerful is that if you force X on us, we’ll crawl over broken glass to get back at you.

The same “professional protesters” show up for every cause. Every one of their “grass roots” organizations has funding ties back to Tides and its like. There might be exceptions, but even with them their real goal is to latch unto foundation and/or government cash and join the astroturf circus.

Instapundit has occasionally pointed to an article where one of “key players” admitted that “campaign finance reform” was completely ginned up by an advertising agency, including “grass roots” groups and “impassioned” advocates.

The only reason anyone gives a rip about the “cause du jour” from the left is that the press keeps it in the publics’ face, never putting the claims into context, never letting up on the “horror” of whatever they’re pushing.

I think another thing that gun control advocates really need to understand is that NRA is the way NRA is because of it’s members. There’s no one else pulling the strings, and no well of gun control support within the organization that can be tapped for political purposes. What people tell pollsters is greatly different than what they will actually vote on, if you actually look at the history of this issue. Polling showed that the handgun ban proposed in Massachusetts was going to pass, albeit barely. The reality was it was defeated overwhelmingly. The same story repeated itself with the “handgun freeze” ballot measure in California, which was just a ban on sales.

I find it humorous (I guess darkly so) that the left views the NRA as some “nexus” that can be picked at, killed and the problem will go away. Somehow the general populace in the leftist camp believes the NRA is a “front” for corporations and does their bidding. (The same corporations telling GC states to pound sand…) I figure those with power and prestige probably know better, but put on a really good act. I don’t believe that they think 5 million plus will pick up their guns and use them to defend their rights though. They like power and want to keep it that way. Their miscalculation will be brutal at the polls, but only if the GOP wakes its sorry butt up. Part of our personal approach should be to influence local GOP chapters to start getting good people in there, and shuttling the bad to retirement centers. Actions first at a local level will change the momentum. If we can attack at all levels, we should.